DESCRIPTION: (Applicant's Description) This proposal is submitted by the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health located in Brooklyn, New York. The purpose of the breast cancer control project is to utilize beauty salon hair stylists, an indigenous group of community confidants, to influence the breast health behaviors of a defined under served population of women. The target communities are within Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, an area that is predominantly minority and low income. The project's goal is to examine the efficacy of a training model on breast cancer control in a predominantly poor minority community utilizing a community trustee - hair stylists, as information broker. Specifically, the project is designed to: 1. To conduct a needs assessment focus group utilizing a convenience sample of 10 stylists who were participants in a salon-based health education project. 2. To select and train community-based professional stylists (as messengers) in specific knowledge, attitudes and skills that will enable their delivery of breast cancer control messages to their customers. 3. To examine, via a randomized controlled trial, the impact of stylist delivered breast cancer control messages on the breast health behaviors (mammography, CBE, BSE) and stage of change of beauty salon customers. 4. To develop a portable stylist training-communications package (port-a-paks with training video) to enable the ongoing training of stylists, and conduct, via a controlled trial, an outcome evaluation of breast health behaviors of salon customers comparing method of stylist training (video versus live-training). 5. To organize a community-based Health and Beauty Council to continue the stylist training program m support of the intervention. Research indicates that the medically under served black woman still bears the greatest breast cancer mortality burden in the nation, medically under served women report much lower screening prevalence rates, and there continue to be women who are not screened or who are not screened regularly. Studies define the problem of lower screening prevalence rates as tied to (1) failure to reach the medically under served, (2) inadequacy of approaches given the cultural expectations and experiences of women to be served, and (3) absence and/or limitations of strategies that sustain the screening behaviors of women. The intent-to-treat analysis will use these dichotomous outcome variables and the group comparisons will be performed using the methods of loglinear methods with a two-level nested design.